06.06.1996

Tax potholes in Scotland

In an attempt to be all things to all people, the Labour government-in-waiting is creeping down the yellow brick road to power, obsessed with avoiding banana skins, real or otherwise, scattered by ‘popular’ opinion and the demands of big business.

Blair’s Dorothy is in search of that pot of gold and occupancy of Number 10 at the end of the rainbow. He is joined by Jack Strawman, looking for the right policies on crime to outdo Michael Howard - this week it is curfews on kids. Then of course there is Prescott, the lion that lost his growl.

This week’s adventure involves trying not to upset anybody over their commitment to a Scottish parliament. Their equivocation and lack of campaigning on the question has led their bourgeois opponents - the Tories, Liberal Democrats and SNP - to ask what their current position is?

It all comes down to that three-letter word - tax. In an effort to deflect the Tories’ accusation of a Tartan Tax being levied on the Scots by an Edinburgh-based parliament, the Labour leadership is looking to pledge that it will not raise or lower taxes during its first four-year term. The shadow cabinet is likely to approve a formula which retains the power to vary Scottish income tax by up to 3%, in either direction, in the devolution legislation planned for the first session of a Blair government.

However, the Labour Party will promise not to take up that power in the first term of a Scottish parliament. So anxious is Labour to avoid being identified with tax, that George Robertson is said to be toying with the idea that a tax change in Scotland would need the agreement of three-quarters of the Edinburgh parliament, or even that it would have to be agreed by the British Chancellor of the Exchequer. No further proof is needed to show that Labour’s plans are a facade. The party has no commitment to the question of genuine self-determination.

While Gordon Brown courts the financial institutions of the city of London, Robertson has been attempting to calm oil industry bosses worried about the tax raising powers of a Scottish parliament.

The working class and the left in Scotland must not be suckered into thinking that Labour’s Scottish parliament will address the democratic deficit in a genuine sense. Labour’s real agenda is the interests of British capitalism, not the interests of the working class.

Andy Maclean